Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Joint Committee and as a signatory to the alternative report. Perhaps I may add my own words of thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Richard. His was not an easy task, as we slogged our way towards a total of 30 meetings—a record, I gather, for a Joint Committee. I am perhaps a touch unusual in getting seriously excited by constitutional matters, but as the tally of our sessions mounted, even I was reminded of that shrewd observer of our country, George Bernard Shaw, who said that the English invented test match cricket in order to give the British people a sense of eternity. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, got us through and on time, and I am grateful to him and to our clerks, though I should point out to the noble Lord that there were two Cross-Bench members of his committee, not one as he suggested.

Every generation or so, we take a crack at the question of Lords reform. We throw the particles in the air and hope that, this time, they will fall in a way that paves a path on the road to consensus. Once again, we have failed, as the voting figures in volume 1 of the Joint Committee’s report show, as does the existence of the alternative report. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, spied the outline of a consensus. Over those 30 meetings of the Joint Committee, I have to tell the noble Lord, there was not a flicker of consensus. The noble Lord the Leader of the House is succumbing to an attractive outbreak of Pollyanna-ism, which is always pleasing but in this case is utterly misleading.

So, what next? In the coming Session of Parliament, we could immerse ourselves in the constitutional mire, dissipating copious quantities of parliamentary time and political nervous energy on the Government’s proposed Bill, probably boring the country and ourselves rigid except at moments of showdown and all with no guarantee that the statute will emerge at the end unless the coalition is prepared to reach for the Parliament Acts in what could well be the near twilight of its term. Is it wise to attempt to settle the future of the second Chamber before we know the outcome of another grade 1 listed constitutional question, Scottish independence, which is to be the subject of a referendum in autumn 2014?

There is an organic, incremental alternative to the invasive surgery proposed by the coalition for your Lordships’ House. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, described it with great eloquence in her oral evidence to the Joint Committee, as did Peter Riddell, director of the Institute for Government, in his. Put their thoughts together with the content of the Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, and the proposals under consideration by the usual channels from the Leader’s Group on Working Practices chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and you have in the making a substantial and hugely worthwhile reform which would have the additional benefit of being fuelled by a high level of genuine consensus.

The Joint Committee’s report acknowledges this in paragraph 11, which reads:

“Other approaches to reform are of course possible. A number of our witnesses advocated an incremental approach, focusing on issues on which there exists a large degree of consensus: the mode of appointment, the size of the House, retirement, disqualification and expulsion”.

The paragraph continues:

“Lord Steel of Aikwood's private member's Bill attempted to address some of these issues. The Joint Committee was established to consider the draft Bill, however, and we have kept within our remit”.

The alternative report, on pages 78 and 79, goes further and actively urges the Government to,

“consider including further proposals for immediate reform, including those put forward by Baroness Hayman, the former Lord Speaker, and those contained in the Leader’s Group report of working practices in the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Goodlad”.

Among the candidates for what the alternative report calls “immediate reform” are: reducing the size of the House to about 500, future appointments to carry a fixed term, the Appointments Commission to be made statutory, an end to the link between peerages and the honours system, a retirement scheme for Members, the matter of expulsion and exclusion and the ending of by-elections following the deaths of hereditary Peers. I know that the last will not find consensual support from several noble Lords whom I respect and admire.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I am listening very carefully to the noble Lord’s interesting proposals. Do any of them relate to the issue of democracy and election?

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

In the purest sense, no, but the virtue of our system, as I have always seen it, is that the undisputed primacy of the House of Commons, if I can put it bluntly, takes care of democracy. I know that the noble Lord and I will not agree on this although we agree on so many other things.

The danger is that while anticipating the so-called big-bang answer to the question of the Lords, nothing will happen, needed reforms will be stymied and the planning blight that has afflicted your Lordships' House since the departure of the bulk of the hereditary Peers in 1999 will continue. The ingredients of a substantial reform are lying at our feet. Let us pick them up, fashion them into something coherent, something valuable, and let us implement that bundle of reforms before the next general election.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, I think it was Oscar Wilde who once said that in a democracy the minority is always right. I have to say, as a Liberal Democrat, that it is a saying that has given me much comfort over the years, and I have a suspicion that it will have to give me some comfort today. I rise, of course, to argue the case for a democratically elected second Chamber—a case made by my party for 100 years. The time was ripe for that 100 years ago. It is essential now.

I just ask my noble colleagues in this place whether they find it acceptable, at a time when people are dying for democracy, that we should have in this place somewhere that infringes the fundamental principle of a democratic state, which is that the people’s laws should be made by the people’s representatives.

[Noble Lords]

They are.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

They are not. We are not the people’s representatives, but we make and amend laws, and are part of the process of producing the laws of this country. We infringe that principle daily. I was sitting here and listening to the arguments made around the Chamber, many of which were, “Yes of course we are in favour of democracy, but not now, not on these proposals, but at some time in the future”. St Augustine should be living at this hour.

However, the question is this: when we frame the laws of this country—you cannot say that we do not participate in this—we do so because we carry with us a democratic mandate. That is the principle of democracy. I was imagining what kind of a debate we might be having if, instead of debating our institutions today, we were debating the institutions in Brussels. I can imagine the kind of thunderous rage that would be expressed against the fact that those undemocratic commissioners in Brussels are able to make laws imposed upon the people of Britain. But we are undemocratic—we participate in that process.

I was imagining what kind of argument might be made if we were discussing Italy. People would have said, “The present Italian Prime Minister is not directly elected, but is elected only by Parliament”. We are elected by no one. As my noble friend Lady Scott said earlier, we are placemen here—no more and no less. I thought that that went out with the Stuart kings. We are the creatures of patronage. There are only two ways to get into this place. One is because you are a friend of the Prime Minister, or at least he does not object to you, and the other is because your great-grandmother slept with the king. There is no other way of getting into this place and the votes of the people have no hand in this process whatever.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I will give way, but allow me to make a little more progress.

The truth of the matter is that this place, whether you like it or not, is a creature of the Executive. When the new Prime Minister comes in, the first thing he or she does is help themselves to a replica of what exists in the other place in order to give themselves the power to push through this place the legislation that they require. Are we really content with that?

I recall well, because I was partly involved, that in 2004 the world’s greatest Muslim democracy, Indonesia, went to the polls. The European Union issued a view, a wish—not an instruction, of course—that when those polls were finally counted there would be no placemen to alter the democratic judgment and that there would be no act of patronage to add to the legislatures people such as army officers or even bishops to alter the voice of the democracy. Yet, so we are here today.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I shall make my point and then I will happily take my noble friend’s point.

On this day, Egypt votes for a new president. The Muslim Brotherhood has recently constructed the Egyptian constitution. Imagine if it had said, “We will have a constitution in which the primary House, which we control, will give us the right to appoint who was in the second Chamber”. Would we not have declared that to be a democratic outrage? Yet we are replicating that precise position here today. I give way to my noble friend.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am most grateful. I always listen with huge attention to what my noble friend Lord Ashdown says, not least because he put me here.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am a placeman, fair enough. My noble friend said, with emphasis, that we are a creature of the Executive. I ask him then, what he makes of the following statistics. In the 13 years of the Blair Government, the Commons defeated the Executive six times. In the same 13 years, this place defeated the Government 528 times. In the coalition period, the Commons has not yet defeated the Government, except on a debate which had no legislative purport; and we have defeated the Government 48 times. It does not sound to me as if it is we who are the creatures of the Executive.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I will come on to my noble friend’s point in a moment, except to say this. The question is not what we do; the question is how we are created. We are created here with a balance in this place that reflects the balance that the Executive enjoy in the other. I will come on to my noble friend’s point, but time is relatively limited, as we were advised, so allow me to make a bit of progress.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me. We have been advised to speak for seven minutes; I am already at six.

[Lord Trefgarne]

The noble Lord made a highly offensive remark just now and I would like to challenge it. He said that some of us were here because our ancestors had slept with a queen. I am the second Lord Trefgarne; my father was the first Lord Trefgarne. He was a Liberal MP.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

He came here by an act of patronage, then, which is the point I was seeking to make.

Let me cite some statistics that may illustrate the point. Despite all the arguments made about primacy, et cetera, all the arguments made that we have to work out the new relationship, here are the figures. The House of Lords Library tells me that there are 71 bicameral legislatures around the world of which, leaving aside the micro-nations in the Caribbean whose constitutions were written by us to reflect ours, only seven are not elected second Chambers, seven have no connection with democracy, and seven are appointed, as we are—leaving aside Great Britain. One of them, for reasons that utterly perplex me, is Canada. But the other six may give us cause to pause for a moment. They do not include great democracies. They are Belarus, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Jordan and Lesotho. That is the company we keep. Those are not great defenders of democracy. How is it that in every other legislature, all of them with elected second Chambers, issues of primacy, the issues which hold up people’s agreement with democratic reform in this place, are not great problems?

Here is the reason why it is said that we do not have to observe the principles of democracy. My noble friend alluded to it a moment ago. It is because, apparently, it works—in that curious, untidy, rather British way, nevertheless, it works. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It does not work. There are two functions of a second Chamber. The first is to revise and the second is to hold the Executive to account. The first of those we do rather well. We are graciously permitted to follow along with a gilded poop-scoop, clearing up the mess behind the elephant at the other end of the Corridor, but when it comes to stopping the elephant doing things, when it comes to turning it round, when it comes to delaying it on the really big things that matter, we do not succeed. How can we challenge the Executive on big things when we are a creature of the Executive?

I do not believe that if we had had a reformed, democratic second Chamber, we would have had the poll tax, but we did. I do not believe that we would have gone to war in Iraq either, but we did. The last time that I said that, there was much twittering saying, good heavens, should a second Chamber have the right to say whether a nation goes to war? Yes it should. I see no problem with that. There is no problem with the Senate in America. That has not stopped America going to war. There is no problem with the Senate in France, one of our closest and immediate allies in Libya and which put more troops into Bosnia than any other nation and suffered greater casualties.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I will make the point and then I will take the noble Lord’s intervention. There is one nation in Europe which may be insufficiently able to take decisions about military action when it needs to, and that is Germany. The Bundesrat, the second Chamber in Germany, has no say over going to war. However, there is no reason why a second Chamber should not be asked whether to ratify treaties or whether it is reasonable to go to war. Why is that possible everywhere else in the world but impossible here?

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, if a second Chamber can block the nation going to war, what does that tell us about the primacy of the first?

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

Of course the first Chamber is going to have primacy. That is readily established in every other bicameral system in which there is an elected second Chamber. However, on the issue of whether to go to war, in the United States the President has to get the agreement of both Houses of Congress. Has that seriously prevented the United States going to war? Quite the contrary. This is an issue on which this House, as an elected Chamber, should be able to exercise its rights.

The time has arrived to bring this place up to date. The time has arrived when we have to stop what is not only an anachronism but an undemocratic anachronism. We send our young men out to fight and die and, perhaps worse still, to kill others in the name of democracy but we do not have a democratic second Chamber in this country, as is the case with the vast majority of bicameral systems throughout the world. Why can they cope with democracy but not us? Is our democracy so ineffective and immature and are our institutions so weak that we cannot cope with what they can cope with and we have to resort to the kind of principles that operate in Bahrain and Belarus?

This place is an anachronism and an undemocratic anachronism, and I am in favour of a fully elected second Chamber. However, if the proposition put forward by the committee as a compromise is the best one that we can achieve, I shall happily vote for it. By the way, I also believe that it should be supported by a referendum. The reality is that this is a reform that can no longer wait. Our democracy is in danger. We have to start renewing the democratic structures of this country, and the reform and democratisation of the second Chamber is part of that process. We cannot keep this waiting any longer. We have a proposition; we should take it up and do the business now.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I remind the House that noble Lords are speaking for quite a time. If all noble Lords take as long, we shall be sitting very late indeed.

[Lord Stirrup]

Before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps he can help me on one extremely important point. I think that he referred to the most important element or principle of democracy as the right of the people to elect those who represent them. Rather, is it not the right of the people to remove those who represent them—something for which I believe there is no provision in this Bill?

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, there is a provision in the Bill, although one might argue that a 15-year term is rather long to make that as effective as it should be. I am not claiming that the Bill is perfect—of course I am not. There are things that I would wish to see that are not there, not least that it should be a fully elected second Chamber. I am simply saying that we have an opportunity to reform. You have to choose between keeping this place as it is, which in my view is totally insupportable, or moving towards democratically based reform of the sort proposed by the Bill. The second of those may be a compromise but it is one that I embrace with enthusiasm because it will at least start the process.